Posts Tagged ‘The Guardian’

This made me laugh, although it’s hard to imagine that someone, somewhere, hasn’t pitched this idea seriously to some newsletter or other. The best bit?

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays.

The news a fortnight ago that Culture minister Andy Burnham has rejected proposals to allow product placement in British TV has caused a fairly widespread negative reaction across the advertising world, with bloggers and columnists alike disparaging his take on the subject as short-sighted and simultaneously behind the times, and it’s not hard to see why.

The fact is that the old distribution model is weakening under the strain of digital – Clay Shirky wrote in the Guardian in January about newspapers struggling to adapt to digital and burying their heads in the sand with regard to the impact the internet is having on their distribution model (which Rory Sutherland followed up on in Campaign on Friday, although doesn’t seem to be on their website yet). The same problems face the TV industry, although in this case the real crime is that legislation like this is forcibly pushing their heads under the surface and giving them little chance to adapt, even if they wanted to.

Fascinating article in The Guardian this morning by Patrick Barkham about the progressive learning methods being tested out at Monkseaton high school in Tyneside. Using a system developed by the school’s head teacher, Paul Kelley, the school is trialling ‘Spaced Learning’, a method of teaching which involves holding 90 minute long lectures (accompanied by PowerPoint slides), that consist of the same materials repeated three times, with a break in between each in which pupils have to carry out physical tasks such as juggling, plate spinning etc. The system itself is based on research conducted by an American scientist, Douglas Fields, whose experiments with the removed and sustained hippocampuses of lab rats were able to determine that cells in the brain were most quickly able to form strengthened synapses (i.e. long term memories) when exposed to stimulation three times, with each stimulation interspersed with a ten minute break.

The results of applying Fields’ findings to the school’s pupils’ learning environment has, for the most part, been incredible. To quote the article –